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By Hector TobarLos Angeles Times • Friday January 4, 2013 6:04 AM

The Antidote begins with thousands of people trying to think positively together.

Oliver Burkeman, the author, attends a “Get Motivated!” session in a baseball stadium. In
exchange for a pricey fee, he hears President George W. Bush deliver a talk on the power of
optimism — and Robert H. Schuller, the self-help guru and founder of the Crystal Cathedral,
confidently reveal the secret of success.

“Here’s the word that will change your life,” Schuller tells the audience before a dramatic
pause.“Cut! . . . Cut the word
impossible from your life. . . . Cut it out forever!”

A few months later, Schuller — the ringmaster of the love-fest — declares his Crystal Cathedral
bankrupt.

The ironic opening represents one of several amusing and instructive passages in
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, which takes every
self-help book and turns it inside out.

Burkeman, a British journalist, starts with a skillful and entirely persuasive dissection of the
arguments through which millions of books about success and happiness have flown off shelves.

A close examination of such books, Burkeman writes, finds nothing more than a bunch of banal
messages.They rarely help anyone, according to scientific research.Publishers know: Their “18-month
rule” states that the person most likely to buy a self-help book bought another self-help book —
one evidently not very helpful — within the past 18 months.

Having established that the ideas in self-help books qualify as superficial and often
self-defeating, Burkeman heads off in search of what he calls a “negative path to happiness” where
a “backwards law” prevails.

Accept the idea that you will inevitably die. Learn to celebrate your failures. See the wisdom
in your pessimistic thoughts. Burkeman writes that “The effort to try and feel happy is often
precisely the thing that makes us miserable.” He argues that “It is our constant efforts to
eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure or sadness — that is what causes us to
feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy.”

In search of the “negative path” to happiness, Burkeman’s book takes readers to a Kenyan slum, a
Massachusetts meditation retreat and the deathbed of a man who dedicated his life to writing
eloquently about death.

Using the example of the disasters that have befallen many who have tried to climb Mount Everest
— the ultimate type-A personality goal — Burkeman shows persuasively that “goal setting” as a path
to success is a fallacy.

Countless books relate the triumphs of the adventurers and the corporate executives who set
ambitious goals for themselves, and who take risks in the relentless pursuit of those goals. What
those books don’t tell us is that the leaders responsible for the world’s most spectacular failures
possess exactly the same qualities. It’s a simple but powerful insight.

Instead of thinking about success so much, Burkeman writes, consider the nirvana one reaches in
failure, where we see who we really are and learn that failing miserably usually isn’t the disaster
we imagine it to be.